In the network facilities of cell-phone operators, there appear operational data such as location data of cell phones and attribute data of users to provide telecommunications services to users of cell phones. By performing statistical processing such as totalization on these operational data, we can obtain estimated values about demographics such as “population distribution,” “population change,” and “population composition.” Of these, the “population distribution” is a population distributed in each of areas, the “population change” is a change of population along a time axis in a certain area, and the “population composition” is information about a population distribution or a population change, for example, in divisions such as genders or age groups.
The aforementioned location data is, for example, location registration signals. They are signals transmitted approximately at regular intervals from a cell phone to a serving base station, and when a certain base station receives a location registration signal of a certain cell phone, it can be estimated that the cell phone exists in a sector being a coverage area of the base station, at a time of reception.
Another example of the location data is GPS information. This is information about the GPS positioning result transmitted at regular intervals from a cell phone to a serving base station or transmitted in accordance with an operation of the terminal or in accordance with a request from a cell phone network. With this information, it can also be estimated similarly that the cell phone exists around a location indicated by the GPS positioning result, at a time of reception of the GPS information (e.g., cf. Patent Literature 1).
If the number of cell phones (the number of terminals) existing in a certain geographical area can be estimated from the observation result of the location data as described above, we can expect that estimated values about the aforementioned various demographics are obtained by further taking a subscription rate of cell phones or the like into consideration.